The Devil rolled her onto her back, and drove his mouth hard over hers. He breathed, bludgeoning her with air. Her lungs rebelled and she retched again. He was expecting it, and had her turned so that she could breathe afterwards. He was already mixing something else for her, muttering to himself in a coarse and guttural language.
The second injection caught her right at the base of her skull, stabbing inwards and upwards, freezing her brain and briefly turning everything she saw bright pink.
Then it faded. It all faded.
Raven fell down through the ground and out into darkness, blessedly black, blessedly cool. She lost track of her body, she lost all the power to speak or think. She was alone with her pain, her fear, and her mother’s voice, asking that question that Mary Frances Carter had long ceased to have power to answer.
Why, baby? Mary, why?
The reply came out of the blackness, his voice echoing in the empty that matched his awful eyes.
Why not?
*
‘Well, boy…’ Urak’s voice swam up from the back of Kane’s brain, speaking in precisely that tone of calm that usually preceded one hell of a storm. ‘What went wrong?’
“I don’t know,” Kane said wearily.
Imagination or no, Kane’s head actually rocked back with the non-force of the slap with which his father would have greeted that answer.
‘She nearly died,’ Uraktus went on, disapproval darkening every word. ‘Don’t you think you’d ought to know why?’
It was the smoke. Kane was almost sure of it. The smoke from that paper wrap, or more accurately, from whatever drug was burnt inside it.
‘So a taste of one of the poisons you are even now filtering from her body set her off.’ Urak’s black incredulity was undimmed by death, his voice quieting in the way it had just before his father lost his temper. ‘Say it again, boy. I need to know you really meant it.’
Damn him.
“I didn’t run a cross-reaction check before I injected her,” he said, and scowled down at the wan and twisted face of his sleeping human. He was so disgusted with himself he could hardly stand it. He’d mixed up the filters for all those different toxins, programmed the nanozymes, and just plugged it right into her. Just as though he’d never done it before, never practiced on all those slaves, never had a father who trained him to do it.
‘You need to start making a habit of thinking.’ The voice of his father was scathing, and dead or not, he could still make Kane want to fidget. ‘Wanting to fuck is not excuse enough to make a mistake that basic.’
Kane thought it was a damned good excuse, actually, but he was still angry with himself. Not with his human; even if the stolen breath of poison had brought the fit on, he couldn’t be angry at her for it. She couldn’t know any better, and there was no point in punishing her for ignorance. Rules and punishments made a human docile, but knocking one around whether it had misbehaved or not was a really good way to piss it off, and a pissed-off human was capable of anything.
Besides. He did want to fuck her. As poor an excuse as that might be, when the sun beat down on him tomorrow, he wanted a female to bury himself in and get away from the worst of its fury. Kane waited for his father’s sarcastic comment, but there was nothing. Even the subconscious shadow of him that spoke in his father’s voice knew Urak’s mating preferences would make further recriminations hypocritical.
To fuck a human…
He’d had his chances, the gods knew. For as long as he could remember, there had been humans in the Null’s hold at least twice a year, and plenty of stops at breeding facilities and Kevrian sex-houses. Kane may have been the only crewman who hadn’t fucked one, but there was something so inherently distasteful in the very thought of it that he’d never even been tempted to before. Humans were too little, too creepily similar in form to Jotan. It had always seemed to Kane more than a little like fucking a child. He was a bad man by any standards of sentient life in the universe, but some things were wrong no matter what.
Kane couldn’t remember much of how it had felt to sex with the yellow-haired female of his first encounter. He recalled his relief, her struggles, and of course, the dull rage he’d felt when she sucked water and escaped him. The mating itself was a void in his mind. He had been a handspan or less from death, he knew that now. Heat had caught him by surprise, and he had abandoned the maintenance of his body to pursue relief. Now he knew better; he was resigned to it and more, he was equipped to deal with it. Let Heat come. He would take it and he would do his job, and he would probably never look at humans quite the same way again, but he would put it all behind him when he had a ship and a crew of his own.
Kane’s eyes found their way down to Raven’s pinched and sedated face. He lifted a lock of her hair, deep violet framed with pure white, and let it spill through his claws. He was going to have to fuck this one with his wits around him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
He thought of old Urak’s humans. For as long as Kane had memory, Urak had been making Vahst from dead humans and selling the live ones for slaves, and for all that time, it had been Urak’s habit to keep one of them for himself as the ship flew from Earth to the Outer Reaches where the slave trade was going strong. Male, female, didn’t matter. He kept all sizes, all ages, all colors. Trial and error had revealed over time where and how hard you could hit them, what they could eat and what would poison them, and all the other complicated details of their care.
Urak’s last human had been male, and it had lived nearly two years, but there wasn’t much comparison between that human and this Raven. Urak’s slave had the look of prey, for all that he’d survived so long. He’d been thin-faced and frantic, always frightened, even after all that time in the relative safety of the commander’s favor. Old Urak had remained fascinated by him, but to the rest of the crew, the human was an irritant and an uncalled-for distraction, too damned fragile for life on the smuggler’s ship.
Not, Kane knew, that fragility had killed him. Or at least, it hadn’t killed him without help.
Kane had gone down to the cargo hold. He no longer remembered why. His business there hadn’t taken long, he knew that, but it had taken him all the way through the cramped bay, in and out of the stacks with nothing but the thump of the engines and the pipework above him to be his navigating points. And on his way back through the maze of cargo, he’d stepped out into a kind of clearing and found Varr with Urak’s human.
The human had been bent over a crate with Varr’s hand splayed over the side of its face, pressing it firm against the rough material. Varr was standing behind him. It took Kane a second or two to realize what he was looking at.
Varr had already seen him, but seeing him wasn’t stopping him. He continued his mating movements, pushing raw grunts from the human’s miserably-twisted mouth, and watched Kane without any appearance of concern.
Incredibly, the only thing Kane could think to say was, “That doesn’t belong to you.”
Varr backed up at once, drawing his cock free of the human’s cloacae, and shoved the human to the floor. There was blood on Varr’s wet shaft, blood trickling slow down the human’s thighs. “Come and get some,” Varr said, baring his teeth. “If it bothers you so much, I’ll let the fucking thing go, but this cock—” He’d gripped it hard, squeezing blood out between his fingers. “—is going into someone. It’s him, runt, or it’s you.”